Thomas Baumann

Persönliche Pläne/ Personal Plans

What are your plans for the next Sunday? More generally, where is the plan that would facilitate our orientation in space, in everyday life, in the landscape, ultimately in life itself? Plans are means of ordering and thus of orientation. They are also the first concrete manifestations of thought. Initially ephemeral concepts and can as it were find their first footing in plans and thereby be verified. Plans can have real topographies and architectures as their point of departure; vice versa, they can also translate ideas into reality. They can clothe mundane everyday events in new order systems, and capture the known, the recalled and the experienced in small spontaneous sketches or precise compositions, as well as in dynamic and ample projections or poetically exalting montages.

The medium of drawing is particularly suited to communicating the idea of bipolar creativity: on the one hand, intimate drawings done in seclusion, on the other, marvellously expansive outline plans for new worlds. The group exhibition Persönliche Pläne / Personal Plans will show twelve different positions by young artists, ranging from small sheets to presentations in installation forms to works applied directly to the wall. Because the exhibition has been deliberately designed to be heterogeneous, it provides sufficient scope for works that seem scribbled down absent-mindedly, for the well-calculated line, and for performative moments. By concentrating on the medium of the drawing as the site of the first idea, the exhibition highlights immediacy and the joy of experimentation: some of the artists will take over whole rooms or present works specially conceived for a particular room. The plans of this young generation of artists are many and varied: the lines lead from private life plans openly presenting diary-like notes to projections of supposedly rational worlds which still continue to be subjective montages in space. Although the main emphasis is not on a critique of the media, it is quite evident that irrespective of the possibilities of technology the drawing – the first and simplest of all genres – has lost nothing of its topicality.

The question of the plan is a worthwhile discussion point in everyday life as in art; this exhibition of plans provides an appropriate platform for elaborating on and reformulating the medium of drawing and the different associations it awakens.